Rock U - Workflows - Text to Workflow

Transcribed Video Content

Text to workflow is a creative and convenient way to interact with the members of your organization using Rock's powerful workflow capabilities. What it does is allow you to launch a workflow in response to an incoming SMS text message. Let's take a look at how it works. So one example of how text workflow might work for your organization is say your church has baptisms coming up and you want to let everyone know the details and direct them to a sign up link. You can use text to workflow to send an SMS prompt to everyone at once. When they respond with a trigger word, such as baptism, Rock will launch a workflow made up of whatever activities and actions needed, such as sending a reply SMS with details and registration link, sending internal communications to staff, setting up automatic reminders, or any other combination of actions. Because the capabilities of Rock's workflows are endless, the possibilities of text workflow are endless too. You can get really creative with this technology. And so think outside of the box. And if you come up with a cool application for text to workflow, please share it with our community. Okay. Let's look at the components of text to workflow. It requires a little bit of setup, but it's pretty simple to do. There are two main components of text to workflow, your workflow and the text to workflow defined type. You can configure text to workflow to also include other elements such as a content channel, but we'll get to that in a bit. First, I wanna show you the first component of text to workflow, the workflow that will be triggered by the SMS keyword. So your workflows are configured under general settings, admin tools, general settings, workflow configuration. And I've set up a sample text to workflow here. You can see my activities. And if I click the edit button, I have my details set up, my advanced settings set up, and here are my attributes. And down below here I have all of my activities and actions. So that's the first component. The second component is the defined type, the text to workflow defined type, which can be found under the define type screen, which is also admin tools, general settings, define types. So this is the text to workflow defined type. You can see it has four attributes. Rock ships with these attributes, but you can add more if you want. The attributes that ship with Rock are the keyword expression. This is the word the recipient will text to launch the workflow, the workflow type, and this is the type of workflow to launch, the workflow name template, this is the lava template to use for setting the workflow name, and the workflow attributes. This is the list of keys and values of workflow attributes to set with the given Lava merge template. To set up your text workflow, click the plus button here, and you can add a new defined type. So since we're doing our baptism example, let's set that up. So the value is going to be the number the person will text the keyword to. So I'm gonna make up a number here. One five five five. Okay. The keyword expression is the word that the people will text to this number to launch the workflow. So since we're doing baptism, I'm gonna type in the word baptism. The workflow type is the workflow that you want to launch. And the workflow name template is where you can provide a name for the workflow. And this field is Lava enabled, so you can use Lava merge fields to create a a dynamic name if you'd . You see below there are workflow attributes. The workflow attributes are the Lava enabled attributes and values you'll you'll use for your defined type. For example, the name of the person responding to the text to workflow prompt. So for example, I could say in here an attribute of from person, and I can use Lava to find that person's name. When I click save, you'll see here is my text to workflow defined type. The following lava fields are available for use with text to workflow. So with your two components configured, the workflow and the define type, you're ready to use text to workflow. But that's just the basics. You can get creative and incorporate other Rock elements into your text to workflow routine. For example, you could add an action in your workflow to send content from a content channel such as a link to a video message or a blog post in response to the person texting the keyword expression. So you see, this is a really cool way to communicate with the members of your organization. Please be sure to check out the blasting off with workflows manual for additional information about setting up Twilio for your organization, how to handle error messages, how industry texting keywords impacts text workflow, and how truncating keywords and setting their order can make text to workflow work even better.